jean-baptiste fastrez turns an inflatable boat and a wall fixing into mirrors to look and to be looked at

'I like the paradox of an object that has such a strong physical presence, yet whose image is almost entirely made up of whatever surrounds it,' says the french designer, who has spent more than a decade of his practice reworking the mirror through different forms and materials. sofia lekka angelopoulou October 20, 2026 9 min prefer designboom on googleThe mirror as an object to look and to be looked at ‘The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place,’ said Michel Foucault in a 1967 lecture, explaining that in a mirror you see yourself where you are not, ‘in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface.’ He then called it a heterotopia as well, since the mirror does exist in reality, where it ‘exerts a sort of counteraction’ on the position you occupy. No other object in a house behaves this way, since everything else in a room is looked at while a mirror hands the room back with its viewer inside it. That duality, between what the object looks like and what it does to whoever stands in front of it, has given the mirror an unusual position in design.